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The popular success of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink has refocused attention on the perennial issue of intuition versus reason. Rational decision making has been the dominant model since at least World War II, when the military’s need for fast, accurate calculations gave rise to new tools for scientific decision making and fueled the rapid expansion of computing.

The spread of computing from government to the workplace led to the metaphor of the human brain as computer and the notion that the best decisions were driven by brute rationality. (Indeed, as a 12-year-old devotee of Popular Electronics in the 1950s, I built a “decision machine” with vacuum tubes that promised to enhance any decision.) Out of the coupling of society’s emphasis on rationality and its growing interest in leadership emerged the image of the heroic leader making lonely decisions at the top, neither asking for nor receiving any help, with rationality as his guide (back then it was always “his”).

This model, articulated or tacit, remains strong even today. But there have always been dissenters who challenged the idea that any one person can know enough to make optimal, or even reasonable, complex organizational decisions. The twentieth-century economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote several stinging critiques along these lines and advised that we depend on markets for smart decisions instead. In recent years, we have seen numerous examples of how the many, when informed, make better decisions than the individual—a concept celebrated by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. Consider the success of “whisper numbers,” which often predict companies’ future earnings better than individual analysts do. And does anyone doubt that Hewlett-Packard would be better off if a group of its senior executives had made a collective decision about whether to merge with Compaq? Cumbersome as that process might have been, the decision probably would have been better than the one reached by a single person.

If collective decisions are often demonstrably better than individual ones, why do we embrace the single-person, rational-actor model? I think the answer lies in evolutionary psychology. An instinctive faith in the reliability of hierarchical leadership is baked into our genes. A hundred thousand years ago, it surely made sense for a single leader to make command decisions for the group (put another way, cavemen who sought consensus as the wolves bore down probably got eaten). Back then, consuming lots of fat to stock up for a famine also made sense, as did the tendency to band together in tribes and stigmatize, if not kill, outsiders. Yet no one would say these measures are sound today, even if they’re instinctive.

What worked for our Stone Age forebears doesn’t work in the corporation today. It’s time to acknowledge that it’s impossible for any individual to make fully informed decisions about running vast entities like large firms and nations. Leaders do, of course, have a role to play—inspiring the troops, building teams, representing the organization. But when it comes to organizational decision making, maybe America’s national motto, E pluribus unum, can be used to new effect: From many voices, one better decision.

A version of this article appeared in the June 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Laurence Prusak is an independent consultant who teaches in the Information and Knowledge Strategy program at Columbia University.

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